This essay addresses one of the crucial challenges facing paleoscientists today, namely, to what extent human or natural forcings have influenced environmental change in the 'Holocene, and how accurately can they be detected and attributed? According to Oldfield and Dearing (2003), climate change and human-induced change are difficult to distinguish from each other, and this paper aims to explore why. At this point it is important to define and outline the parameters of the essay. A Holocene perspective is adopted in this essay, which will include a discussion of the Anthropocene. This essay also aims to explore different aspects of the environment, namely the terrestrial, atmospheric and aquatic realms, although there are biases in the literature in favor of the terrestrial realm and the dominant environmental problem is that of climate change. The following points will be discussed: recent environmental changes, difficulties of detection and attribution, examples to illustrate the complex nature between climate-human-environment and the role of research in addressing this problem. The product of Holocene environmental change presents a difficult task to unpack as it is subject to human influence, natural influence, terrestrial processes and all their complex interactions and relationships (Oldfield and Dearing, 2003). In some cases, climate impacts are clear and distinct from human impacts, and in others one cannot be assumed to be the only factor at play. It should be noted that disentangling human impacts from climate impacts is not only a challenge during the industrial revolution and beyond; although from then on it became increasingly complex. There is a common consensus among scientists that anthropogenic forcings cont...... middle of paper ......one hundred and fifty years, these disturbances have not significantly changed ecosystem dynamics, but have also altered rates of change (Anderson et al. ., 2006). In a study conducted by Jones et al. (2013) for the detection of climate signals in an anthropogenic disturbed basin – the Petit Lac d'Annecy in France, the results of cross-correlation and spectral analyzes indicated that human activities were dominant in influencing the modeling of the basin during the late Holocene. Less certain, however, is the effect of paleoclimate on the formation and evolution of Petit Lac d'Annecy. This may be due to the absence of historical climate records in the basin ears. Attempts have been made to examine the extent of the impact of paleoclimate, but this has been limited due to difficulties in isolating climate from the human footprint within the proxy record..